<p>It think that this ranking is interesting. I like that it tries to think about things from the results perspective, and I think it is doing a reasonable job within categories. I also like that this method seems to identify the schools that have been successful in gaming the rankings in the USNWR rankings. However, it seems to have traded one set of pitfalls for a different set.</p>
<p>My biggest struggle is with its ranking of LAC’s relative to major Universities. I have nothing against LAC’s, I went to one. However, you would need to show me a lot more details of the scoring to convince me that Williams gets better results for students than HYPMS, that Swarthmore and Haverford get better results than Penn, that Davidson is better than Duke, that Colby college is a better choice than the University of Virginia, William and Mary, the University of Michigan, or UCLA. I also can not convince myself to accept that Penn State is only the 15th best college in Pennsylvania behind Juniata College and Grove City College.</p>
<p>I believe that these issues can resolve themselves by incorporating better employment metrics. In looking at the detailed disclosures that many top colleges like MIT and Penn provide regarding employment outcomes (listing all companies and the number of students hired and tying back to the number of students). The current method seems to allow colleges to ignore unemployment and underemployment, and that is a huge problem. I think that the colleges need to provide more detailed data, and as that occurs, I think that most LAC’s will fall in this ranking, and colleges that provide more training for careers that are in demand will rise. Colleges that provide this detailed information should be rewarded and colleges that refuse should be penalized in the rankings until they comply.</p>
<p>Not if you include the service academies; they’d take the top three spots and HYPMS would still be unhappy. :((
I honestly feel there’s enough in the Forbes ranking to make a broad spectrum of alumni happy and proud. What it probably doesn’t do as well as USNews is shed light on a lot of the lesser known, less selective colleges - many of which are LACs.</p>
<p>I can think of a ranking that’s much better for shedding light on lesser-known LACs–and service academies–than Forbes and USNews… </p>
<p>Re: Much2learn – LACs vs Universities – Williams was behind H, Y, P, and S last year, and Pomona was ahead of H, Y, and P. One year’s results don’t mean much. That said, it’s best to relax such preconceived notions while you wade through rankings.</p>
<p>Indeed. I actually don’t see much evidence that WAS grads <em>don’t</em> do as well as HYPSMCaltech grads. By the measures I look at: Leaders, Student Awards, PhDs, and the percentage in elite professional schools (that the WSJ did a while ago), WAS grads are just as successful as the grads of the best research universities (H being a possible exception and a cut above everyone else).
It seems that the unwillingness to put WAS with YPSMCaltch, at least, stems from prejudice more than anything else.</p>
<p>BTW, @warblersrule, that’s why I combine all 4 of those rankings. Some schools do much better in some of those than others, but the best do well in all.</p>
<p>@circuitrider the link you provided is to the overall rankings and does not have subscores. Is there a document somewhere with the subcategories?</p>
<p>@ Circuitrider
Not if you include the service academies; they’d take the top three spots and HYPMS would still be unhappy. </p>
<p>Well, with the service academies, you also have to factor in the cost of the committment that you made to serve after school and the low level of pay you get for that time.</p>
<p>Rather than arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, we could take the long view and say that if you go to any school on the Forbes list in the Top 100 or the Top 50 of either the National or LAC US News lists, you’re going to a pretty damn fine school and you should count your lucky stars you or your kids are there.</p>
<p>Forbes, as a magazine, does not have a bigger dog in this fight that its targets such as the USNews, the Washington Monthly, and perhaps the Atlantic Monthly and the recent Money. </p>
<p>Obviously, Forbes does not have much of a staff to cover the issues of college admissions really well – just look at their stories and the qualifications of their “academic journalists!” Just as the others wannabes, they had to grab one of the for-hire-mercenaries, and they picked one with … a pretty big dog and chipped shoulders in the form of Richard Vedder and his CRAP center --pun intended. Some might agree with his theories, and like a broken clock he is right a couple of times a day, but he is hardly an objective observer. And his methodology reflects that!</p>
<p>Of course, Forbes could have done a lot worse. I think that dear LLoyd, the snakeoil salesman from the Education Conservancy is still wasting donors’ money and always looking for an irrelevant project to milk. </p>
<p>PS One could go back several years and find the exact same debate. Almost verbatim. CC could cut and paste and we will be in the same place! . </p>
<p>It’s almost baffling how many of these ‘smart’ students who go into PHD programs fail to do basic research about what they’re going to invest the next five to seven years of their life in. When I was considering a PHD program in philosophy, I was actively reading Chronicle and was talking with a lot of different academics in the field. Collectively, both seemed to inform me that going into a graduate program in the humanities was an unwise decision. Almost no one else I knew was doing both (although some would talk to the faculty we had on staff about graduate school.)</p>
<p>Of my very smart friends who applied to PHD programs, only one of them was admitted to one, and that was at our alma mater. Most of them were shuffled to MA programs. And from there, some were rejected from PHD programs. They were all bright students. But my guess is that PHD programs have become ultra-selective in order to increase their placement rates. They’re only taking the best of the best students now.</p>
<p>Even the PHD graduates that I knew, many became adjuncts after they graduated, even those from top programs. It seriously makes zero sense to enroll in a PHD program without doing your research about the program’s placement rates. It almost blows my mind that some people take so much care and attention to detail in selecting their undergraduate programs and do far less in selecting their graduate programs.</p>
<p>True, though I’d expect philosophy PhDs who go in to consulting/business to do pretty well with their analytical and writing skills. However, in that case, school brand does matter.</p>
<p>A few strange things in the list (Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins ranked lower than expected, apparently leading in Computer Science and PreMed is not good enough to break the top 50 - and Navy grads may be mad that their higher scores and selectivity don’t get them a better ranking than West Point) - but overall not too surprising. I do like that they included graduation and retention rates.</p>
<p>@Anniebeats To be honest, their methodology is very much based on things that people should care about when they are choosing between colleges to apply for. A degree is a huge investment and I think that these rankings attempt to enlighten students about what schools they should aim for. </p>
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